job is changing, therefore so must we, or a confession of entitlement, difference, or being caught unawares. This book is an exploration of WPA identity in the twenty-first century; an identification of GenAdmin as a subject position for WPAs in the twenty-first century; a narrative of choice, hybridity, and/or emergence; an opportunity to locate WPA work within larger systems of activity and to reinvent the parameters of those activity systems; and an occasion to disrupt some of the binaries that have caused tensions between how past, present, and future WPAs perceive one another to work and to think, perhaps even to help them arrive at a more nuanced understanding of one another’s positionings in the field. In taking up the questions posed by our Prelude, we arrive at the following understanding of GenAdmin: it is an always emergent identity, a position from which we can destabilize and disrupt prevalent binaries in writing program administration scholarship to, consequently, represent and enact administration as rhetorical theory and philosophical practice.
Challenging History and “Doing Philosophy”
At this point it is useful to mention that in challenging perceptions about administration and in clarifying the purposes for our book, we both build on and build away from Jacqueline Jones Royster’s idea of “disciplinary landscaping” for rhetoric and composition. On the one hand, we recognize that knowledge in rhetoric and composition studies (in writing program administration, specifically) is an interpretive enterprise and social construction (“Disciplinary” 149) that can be collectively “historiciz[ed] based on new perceptions” and “reenvision[ed] . . . in more dynamic ways” (“Disciplinary” 163). Royster makes this point in the context of challenging rhetorical history to disrupt the understanding that African women’s rhetorical participation began in the nineteenth-century United States when we can reasonably situate it three to five centuries earlier by being more inclusive with our collections across genre, space, and time—more inclusive of the terms of their “participation” (“Disciplinary” 151). It is useful to remember that historical situatedness is a matter of geospatial location and rhetorical context, and not merely of temporality. On the other hand, we suggest alternatives to or disruptions of the perpetual mapping and landscaping metaphors that probably inspired Sidney I. Dobrin to charge the discipline of writing program administration with having “foregone the freedom of space in favor of a guarded conservatism to protect its place” (57). That is, of being so preoccupied with legitimation and place that it has “renounced not only critical perspectives of its work . . . but has succumbed to a false security bound up in a mythology of administrative power that fails not only to question the very safety of that place but to deny the potential critical, theoretical, and political work that can be done beyond the borders of WPA-place” (Dobrin 57-58). Whereas maps and landscape images can serve to fortify borders and boundaries (to totalize or imperialize), we disrupt and make more fluid these boundaries as spaces and places to move towards as we chart out new epistemologies for our work.4
Even in our theorization of GenAdmin as a disciplinary identity, we aim to reasonably disrupt the various histories that GenAdmin inherits as well as to consider how such an identifier challenges (or stretches or expands) “disciplinary” history. Like Royster, the larger point we make is that when you shift rhetorical subjects and challenge perceptions, you can reform disciplinary histories beyond geographic and historical scope (“Disciplinary” 152) towards a more nuanced recovery of both self and history. But unlike Royster, we do not strive for self-and-historical recovery as much as we provoke what have traditionally been seen as stringent theoretical (and historical) divisions that limit perceptions of our work. In other words, rather than unsettling past narratives of WPA work so as to more accurately say what GenAdmin is, we strive to enact what GenAdmin does, and to redefine the terms of this en/action in the process.
This move in turn puts a compelling question to our book: What are our explicit interventions in WPA’s theory and history if we do not wish to re-landscape, correct, or totalize in return? What does it mean for us and for GenAdmin to “theoretically disrupt”? In her article “Sp(l)itting Images,” Karen Kopelson poses a similar question, asking readers that if theory need not be applicable, if it need not be justified as a mode of inquiry, and if in fact there is no real need to overcome the theory/practice split (or what she calls the “use/do” divide) (764), then what are requisite roles for praxis in rhetoric and composition? While practice need not be consciously informed by theory, praxis, or “action driven by and resulting from theory” (Kopelson 764), it necessitates a more urgent recognition of a theory/praxis split, since practice is an “explicitly theorized, politicized intervention” (Kopelson 764). To make this new errand explicit, Kopelson argues for a redefinition of “terms such as action, intervention, service, and use” (765), a movement that aligns with how we see GenAdmin praxis being taken up.
Although we may be less concerned than Kopelson’s subjects that our discipline will be seen as a user-doer-producer for others, rather than as a producer of our own knowledge field, we do benefit from Kopelson’s characterization in five dimensions of what she calls a “living rhetoric and composition” (775). We extend these five dimensions towards GenAdmin to consider the tenets that make GenAdmin a living philosophy and that differentiate it from other theoretical subject positions. First, a living philosophy aligns action, intervention, service, and use with politicized intervention rather than with group identification. Second, it links identity to becoming rather than to stability, where participants may be defined less by the spaces they occupy than by how they move between and among them. Third, it is productive—it makes itself, feeds on itself, could itself be seen as a field rather than as in servitude to some other field. Fourth, it relies on both the study of and deployment of language uses, in turn acknowledging the significant role of discourse in its enactments. Finally, it offers a spaciousness around which “an array of disciplinary inquiries and pursuits might best coalesce” (Kopelson 772), including those concerned with ethics and change.
At the heart of a living philosophy we see an illumination and enactment of principles that can themselves carry meaning as useful abstractions, and a flexibility to imagine and respect other people’s truths even as we pursue alternatives. Thus, we do not posit that none of the difficulties raised by our critics is unprecedented or real. However, we do argue that these difficulties create vital gaps in WPA theorizing that push us to reject helpless notions of power for more helpful notions of disciplinarity and agency. They also push us to embrace the non-universality of our experiences without arriving at an unproductive, unpragmatic, relativistic set of principles from which to practice.
Even still, this philosophy has its limitations. It need not stand in for perfect understanding, perfect rhetorical persuasion, or universally accepted principles of program management—hallmarks of the analytic philosophical tradition rather than a more feminist epistemology that privileges context and subjectivity. It may be a universal enough assumption to acknowledge (by now) that our lives would be easier in some ways if we were not WPAs. However, an overarching value of GenAdmin for us isn’t finding ways to make things easier day to day, but rather making ways to build the discipline by negotiating daily realities in the enactment of rhetoric and writing, whether or not those realities directly pertain to the construction and maintenance of a college writing program. In an attempt at re-orientation and enactment, we have arranged this book around six chapters that both describe and argue for an administrative philosophy embodied in a new generation of writing program administrators by addressing interrelated questions about WPA identities and actions. Both the conflation of rhetoric and composition with writing program administration, and the positioning of them as subsets of English studies are, we think, serious problems; as much as possible, the reader will find that our philosophy elides either conflation or subjugation in favor of other positionings, as we use narrative, reflection, and theorizing to study WPA identities and provide examples of how this theorizing impacts the work that we do.
In so doing, the five of us assign new meaning to the narratives we inherit to articulate our understanding of WPA work within the context of new identities and experiential realities in order to build new knowledge about WPA identities and work. This book follows discussions of how we, as writing program administrators, and as teachers, scholars, spouses, parents, gamers, painters, foodies, hikers, yogis,
